24 February, 2008: Nina
Yea! We found a boat last night that is leaving today! We will spend most of the day in a jeep but this afternoon we will start out on the Rio Beni and will continue for the next two days down river to Rurrenabaque. We are excited. Its with a tour company so everything will be taken care of, no worries! It may be a while before we can write next, so I wanted to let you know where we will be. Swimming with pink river dolphins and getting eaten alive by masquitos! ¡Ciao!
23 February, 2008: Nina
Here is a quick update on "Plan K". After waiting two days for the blockades to clear, we are finally able to get on the road. We were about to head south to the Salt Flats this morning, but are about to inact on a new plan. I won't go into all the details, but there are a lot of variables of whether or not we will be able to fit in both the Salt Flats and the jungle trips. Most of them having to do with the uncertaintly of getting to the jungle. With that being the case, we decided to head to La Paz today, and work out a way to get to the Amazon Basin. That way, we won't be as pressed for time as we would be after having come back from the Salt Flats. We figured that if we can just do one of the two, we definatly want to visit the Amazon. If we are able to work out a trip in a reasonable time-frame, and have time left to visit the Salt Flats, then great. So, our first choice is to try to get to Rurrenabaque, in the Amazon, by boat, and from there head deeper into the jungle. If we can't make that work, we will fly or possibly go by road. Hopefuly we will know more by tonight!
21 February, 2008: Nina
As Matthew mentioned below, this morning was heart-breaking. How do you explain to a four-year old who is begging you, "don't go, don't go, don't go". As much as we tried to find some sort of satisfactory explanation, nothing seamed to appease them, or us for that matter. This morning at breakfast we had a chorus of well-wishings for our upcoming journey to the jungle and the return to our country, I'll pray for you Tia (auntie), they would tell me, or, I will ask God to send you a precious angel, with all the seriousness they can muster. But when it came down to the moment we were giving and recieving our final hugs, it was to a chorus tears and sobbing. My last visual memory is rounding the corner of the house and blowing kisses back through the window to the tearful faces pressed up against the glass panes.
Carl dropped us off at the bus station, and even our goodbye with him wasn't without tears. An hour later, we were knocking on his front door. We needed a place to stay for the day and night. We found out at the bus station, that there were no busses heading west out of the city, because of road blockaeds ceasing all traffic. There was no alterior route for us, we were stuck in Cochabamba. Knowing we couldn't go back to the houses and go through the trauma of seeing and leaving the kids again, we headed to the Thompson's. Carl couldn't help the huge grin from decorating his face when he found out we were stuck here, for at least another day. So here we are, waiting out the blockades. We hope that they will end sometime tonight and the passage will be clear tomorrow. We are counting on catching a 3:30 train in Oruro, 4 hours from here, on Friday afternoon to take us further south to Uyuni, where we will visit the Salt Flats. We are fairly unacostumed to time constraints, as most of our trip has been without timelines. But having bought our tickets out of Lima, we now have a set amount of time to visit some of the places in Bolivia we have wanted to see. The Salt Flats being one of them, and the Amazon Jungle the other. This proves to be tricky as well, because of the rainy season and the current flooding. Planes to the area we want to visit are very unpredictable at this time, as are the raods. We had even been willing to fly, an option that is usually not in our budget, but it looks like it might not be the best option for us. We had found out about a way to get there by boat, so we are pursuing more information on that, and trying to contact some other travellers to share the trip. We will keep you updated on that and hope that our possible delay to Uyuni won't interfere with our already unstable trip to the Amazon! More adventure to come... stay tuned.
21 February, 2008: Matthew
Nina and I left the house today. It turned out to be I think one of the most difficult departures that I have ever experienced. As many of you know, Nina and I dated long distance between OR and WV for two years. None of our departures from visits together felt like this. We had hopes, and even further definate plans of when we would be together again. We had hopes of a future together. When we left for this journey there were similar types of plans with our families. With our kids at the house, there are some that I will never see again. This was the first time that I have left someone that I have come to care for and love so much, knowing that some of them I will never see again.
Yesterday I just barely held it together while we had a little good-bye gathering with the kids. Our director was hosting, and she asked the kids if anyone wanted to share something about what they remember from our time together. We were delighted to see that everyone wanted to share and we had to quickly resort to raising hands and waiting a turn to share a memory. Nina and I were so blessed. Then, there was a time to pray for us. Again, they were asked if anyone wanted to pray for us, and again we had to select a few who had their hands raised. They prayed over us in their typical style which is for the prayer to say a few words and then everyone repeats, throughout the prayer. It was really beautiful - we were prayed for to be blessed and taken care of by God, and have angels sent to be with us, even "precious" angels.
The kids ask "why are you going?" We respond with explaining that we have been away from home for a long time, and we need to see our family... hmmm, some thinking goes on... "why are you going?" the question is repeated.
These past two months have flown by, and have probably been two of the most precious of my life. Before coming I didn't have the tools to realize what kind of impact these wonderful children would have on my heart. I didn't know that I had the capacity to care about how life goes for these kids as I now do.
19 February, 2008: Nina
Well, we must admit that we have completely failed in keeping the blog updated since we have been at the orphanage, and much to our regret! These last two months have just flown by, feeling more like two weeks, but have been some of our richest experiences yet. Although they have been much less "exciting" in terms of doing things and seeing things, the richness comes in the relationships- with some of the most wonderful kids on earth. We have spent time with these kids in some capacity every day for the last two months, doing everything from eating, bathing, coloring, dancing, singing, cleaning, baking, laughing, hugging, listening, riding bikes, fixing bikes, riding busses, eating ice-cream, going to the park, going to church, going to bed, going to the doctor, the dentist, and much more! Just every-day stuff, participating in life with these little guys. And as we prepare to leave in two days, our hearts are quite heavy.
One of my little four-year old girls has become quite attached to both Matthew and I. I thought it best to tell her a couple days in advance that we would be leaving. I did so this morning and she seemed to take the news ok. But when I tried to leave her to go run some errends she clung to me like a leach and would not let me go. I tried explaining that I would come back in two hours and sit by her at lunch, to save me a seat, but she wouldn´t hear any of it. To avoid the break-down, we took her with us on our errends to immigration and the bus station. At immigration we talked to the officer about extending our visa, and recieved advice to just overstay our current visa and pay the fines. He inquired about Abbi, and a twinge of pain went through my heart. She stays here I told him. On the bus ride back to the house, she fell asleep in my arms, her head resting against my chest. I thought about everything I wish I could give her, everything I would be willing to give her. She would have a mom and a dad, a bedroom, maybe a pet, an education, vacations, 3 cousins, numerous aunts and uncles, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, and so, so much love. But it can´t be.
Before we came here, I hadn´t even imagined that I would fall so much in love with the kids. Enough that I would long to take them home as my own. I knew nothing of the Bolivian adoption regulations with the US but to me it didn´t matter. Now it matters, and there is nothing I can do about it. It simply can´t be. But these kids have certainly sparked something in both Matthew and I, and who knows what is in our future. I hope to continue, in some way or another, being an advocate for the many, many, children out there who long with all their hearts, for a family.
4 February, 2008: Matthew
We had a huge water balloon fight with the neighborhood kids at the park today. It was really fun. When we were in town the other day Nina and I bought three 100 peice bags of water balloons, and this morning we filled them ALL in preperation for the battle. Carnaval started on Friday (or Sat?) which is a big Bolivian holiday, and a significant part of the celebration is throwing water balloons. It is rampant all over the city. Groups of guys will hire trucks and just ride around launching balloons at innocent folks on the sidewalks, other cars (especially with open windows) and occationally also at other water balloon throwers. So the neighborhood kids were launching balloons and squirting water guns over the fence at the house, and so we challenged them to a battle at the park. It was great... we really struck fear in the hearts of our opponents when they saw the buckets filled with water balloons that we were totting to our "fort" on our side of the park. As it turns out they didn't really have that many balloons, but they all had big water guns, and so it was a constant surge and retreat as they had high close-range power, and we had marginal long range power. We guarded just enough ammo to make our final retreat to the house, which would have worked perfect except some of the little ones froze as we were going through the gauntlet on the way back to the house and merely had a couple of balloons with which to intimidate our attackers. That simply resulted in our getting really wet from the super soakers, and our having a couple of easy close range pitches with our remaining balloons. Passionate battle strories are still being thrown all around the house.